In Western democracies now, everybody — everybody — hates professional politicians.
In Britain, the thuddingly conventional Theresa May called an election meant to empower her and barely squeaked by an anti-Semitic terrorist-loving back-bencher loony leftist named Jeremy Corbyn who had spent three decades as his Labour Party’s crazy uncle in the attic. May is a dead prime minister walking.
In France, the leaders of the two major parties that have dominated French politics for nearly 60 years both collapsed in corruption scandals and surrendered their nation to a 39-year-old one-time investment banker named Emmanuel Macron who campaigned with 3-D holograms like Princess Leia and had a little bit of government experience. His party, which came into existence a year ago, is likely to end up with the most dominant position in the national legislature in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
And of course America elected Donald Trump, while the heart of the party that opposed him belonged not to Hillary Clinton — the Theresa May of America — but rather to a 74-year-old socialist gadfly who has never gotten anything done in the Senate.
Of all the political disruptions of recent years, this is the most significant. Enormous numbers of people no longer view politics either as an art or as a profession — as a complex machine, it takes time and patience and knowledge to master so that its power can be harnessed for a greater purpose.
Historically, political scientists have viewed voting populations as essentially conservative in nature. Western writers and thinkers love to talk about “revolutions” — the Reagan revolution, the Gingrich revolution — but that’s an abuse of the term. Revolutions are violent events that literally seek to create a new political social order whose goal is the reconfiguration of the destiny of a nation, a civilization, the planet. Voters don’t vote for revolutions.
The startling power shifts of the last year are not revolutionary, but they do constitute a rare voter revolt. And the revolt isn’t against bad policies. It’s a revolt against the very idea of the politician as a professional who has to master his trade like any other professional.
‘Politics is not something you need to have learned.’
All things being equal, the career of the practical politician follows a classic path. Ideally, she will occupy a variety of positions on her way up the ladder — local, statewide and in the nation’s capital, some legislative, some executive. She needs to gain experience, learn the nuts and bolts of the profession, learn from her mistakes and become both competent and trustworthy. She needs to demonstrate she can build relationships with others to accomplish things.
None of this is operative any longer. Politics is not something you need to have learned. No, better, it seems, to have avoided it completely so that you are not stained by having ever had to compromise or take an incontrovertible position on controversial matters.
In the case of both Macron and Trump, the highest elective posts in their countries have been converted into entry-level positions. Neither had ever stood for office before. Think about this. You wouldn’t take your car to a repair shop whose proprietor had never even so much as changed the oil, but in the second decade of the 21st century, people have felt amazingly free to hand the levers of power and the nuclear football to someone who doesn’t even know what the nuclear triad is.
Macron and Trump sold themselves specifically as anti-politicians beyond the ordinary boundaries of left and right, beholden to no party but themselves — visionary business executives who could cut through the nonsense and get things done.
He seems remarkably powerless in the most powerful job on earth, and remarkably ineffectual.
They took advantage of the mystical cult surrounding successful businessmen that has seeped through our culture to an extent that would have mystified even Sinclair Lewis, the American novelist who won a Nobel Prize for the way he parodied the pompous American man of business in the 1920s.
The cult preaches that the skills of leadership and decision-making every good businessman possesses are transferable to any circumstance. It’s why, to take one notorious example, Apple’s board felt comfortable dethroning Steve Jobs in 1983 and handing the job to a guy who had run Pepsi — because if you’ve run one corporation, hey, you’ve run them all.
That disaster story (Jobs was brought back to save his company a decade later) has been recapitulated a hundred times in Mega Corporation Land, and it broke through into American politics on Election Night 2016. We can see the results in Trump’s first six months.
He does not know how Washington works. He does not know how the executive branch works. He does not know the political system works. He does not understand the difference between the rules that govern a privately held family company and the astoundingly complicated set of rules that have been put in place to restrain American politicians from just doing whatever they want.
He seems remarkably powerless in the most powerful job on earth, and remarkably ineffectual. This enrages and frustrates him. The question is whether this bold experiment in empowering the citizen politician will, over time, prove to be such a failure that we will look again to the people who actually know the rules and master the trade to govern us again.
Or will we just move from Trump to Oprah?
John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary Magazine